Be Sincere

Me, After Falling off a Mountain Bike my Freshman Year 

Freshman year of college: the first line of A Tale of Two Cities come to life, the best and the worst, squished up in eight months running by on fast forward. I am a confident eighteen-year-old when I arrive, a battle-worn, insecure nineteen-year-old when I leave. Nothing will ever be the same.

I sat in the bishop's office that September and received my first calling as an official adult: ward missionary. The words of the blessing I received when I was set apart still ripple through the events that followed like an echoing mantra.  Be sincere.

Sincerity. Dropping down from the superficial place of rules, and rote motions, into the nitty-gritty of life. Exploring the rawness of the human experience in a way that can't leave you unmarked. The only way I could reach God's children as a missionary. Diving in took me from room to room, place to place until that time is an "everything has changed" moment, the fall-back point I still return to after nearly twelve years. Be sincere.

We can't help if we don't see people, if we don't let ourselves be touched by their experiences. We can't give of ourselves if we are protecting ourselves.

It's watching the ones I love struggle. Wanting to give them the gospel, but knowing it's not time yet. It's inadequacy, crying harder than I ever had in my life, and hurting someone even though I tried everything I could not to. It's getting sick, winter depression, and anxiety attacks on the steps outside the dorms. It's the parking lot in mid-day, couched by a sobbing friend who's world had been split through and crumpled up. The worst of times.

It's first love, piles of leaves, rainfall, and sketching on the quad. Music, paper mache balloons, and the safety of my friend, Anne's, bedroom day after day. It's standing in front of a life-size painting of Christ and being moved in a way I'd never experienced, feeling the veil thin in the loneliness of learning of my cousin's passing, and telling God I would let Him lead me to wherever He wanted me to go. The best of times.

It's going home for the summer, and not realizing I wouldn't go back. A single experience, gone. There'd been no time to waste on anything but being sincere.

No time to waste.

In the last few weeks, I sketched over my outline for my newest non-fiction book. I struggled to fill in the gaps, the ever lingering left-over pages. What did God want me to do with this book? How could I make it worth something to someone?

The answer came at writer's group, simple and familiar. It is to peel back the wall between me and my reader, exposing the person underneath the words. It's letting the person I am, and the girl that I was enter the pages and bleed out a little. God made me me for a reason. I can't wall-up myself and help the way I need to. The words are on replay, echoing to me with colors of freshman year.  Be sincere. There are no pages to waste, no words to loose.

Women I Admire: My Daughter and Messages on a Wall

I do a series on my personal blog called Women I Admire. After a hard week where I found myself literally embraced and supported by some angel women in my life, I felt sharing this might be appropriate. It's from about two years ago, so forgive the flash back. I've discovered that messages are still being written on my walls, and the ones written this week were no less important than ones from my childhood. God is still there. He loves me and is still very much aware of me and the trials I face. I'm so grateful for the women He sent to me this week in my moment of need.

Several years ago, I was at a Relief Society mid-week activity that my cousin spoke at. She is married to one of my older cousins and actually was one of my Young Women's leaders growing up. She talked about body image and the way we see ourselves. She told us to close our eyes and imagine walking along a road. I imagined the road, long and empty, cutting through an expanse of yellow and orange dust. Then she said to imagine we came to a wall. We can't get around this wall. Our Savior is standing there. He reaches out and writes something on the wall. What does he write?

She never told us what the Savior would write. In my self-destructive way, I'd been harboring feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness. Up to that point, I'd only berated myself for falling short of the ideals she'd spoke of. To my surprise, when I imagined what my Savior would write on my wall, it wasn't chastisement.

He wrote, "I Love You."

My baby is three months now. The messages she gets are mostly from me. I try so hard to write "I love you" on her wall. I see another Young Women's leader and hear her voice as she spoke of her four young daughters. "I try to never criticize myself in front of them. I don't want them see themselves like that." Its hard, but that is what I'm trying to do as well.

I recently reconnected with another leader from my teenage years. It got me to thinking about these women God put in my life and the messages they wrote on my walls. I didn't always believe them, but they never gave up.

At girls camp one year, a leader came for only a day. Before she left that night, she sang to us. She wrote "You are a daughter of God." across my wall. I believed it then, but doubts slipped in. Months later, at another event, she sang again. Tears spilled down my face as she looked in my eyes and re-etched her message. "Walk tall, you're a daughter, a child of God."

My leaders wrote other messages.

"You're important." When she tracked me down when I didn't show up to one of my very first young women's activities when I was only twelve.

"I trust you." When she let me watch her babies for the entire summer, five years in row.

"You have something to give." When she asked me to sing a solo, even though I wasn't very good at singing.

"God Loves You." Over and over again. "You are his daughter."

The world was writing their own messages. Messages about how tall I was, how wide I was, the size of my feet, the number of pimples on my face. Messages about the times I failed, lost, or came up short. Messages that screamed across my wall.

But when I came to that imaginary wall all those years later and faced my Savior, the messages that stayed were the messages that mattered. The ones that were the truth.

He wrote, "I love you."

And now the messages of these leaders are being written in my daughter's life. "You are beautiful," I tell her. "I love you." "I want you." The women I admired as a young girl are changing my baby's life.

Others will write across my daughter's wall. Some will try to destroy her with lies. But then she will go to Young Women's. She will go to girls camp. She will meet beautiful women God has placed there just for her. They will tell her the truth. They will re-etch across her wall. I pray between us, we will be enough. I pray that when she reaches her own walls, she will also find her Savior, and, with faith burning in her heart, she will already know what He will write.

Only a Child: Bursting the Bubble

By Brocken Inaglory (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC BY-SA 2.5-2.0-1.0 
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5-2.0-1.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

I was seven the day I tasted my first bubble.

I was the sole occupant of the street in front of my house, a 50-yard stretch of asphalt dead-ending at a little copse of trees. I stood, purple bubble bottle and yellow wand in hand, absorbing the glaring summer sunlight that had sent everyone else indoors but that I seemed to photosynthesize into smiles and pumping arms.

I repeatedly pulled the wand from the bottle, dripping refracted light, a sheet like a prism's blink stretched across it eye.

Sometimes I would purse my lips and blow the bubbles myself, but more often I would let the air do it for me, arm outstretched, whirling and watching bubbles stream from the wand, bursting into existence in sparks and glints of color as the wind gave them life.

I stood and watched, the blood rushing in my ears and the world swirling around me. Magical! Floating spheres of light and reflections. The elixir of life, holding precious a tiny breath of air.

I had the sudden urge to taste the bubble. I ran down the street craning my neck, stretching my tongue to reach it, but the wind tasted it before I did, blowing it out of my reach and eating it up.

So I tried again. And again. I ran up the street, down the sidewalk, across neighbors’ yards, into bushes, everywhere the bubbles went, trying to catch one with my lips.

And all the time I had the little jar of bubble solution clenched in one cautious hand. It never crossed my mind to taste from the source, from the bottle or the wand; those weren’t magical. There’s nothing ethereally enticing about a sticky, purple plastic bottle or a yellow, dripping wand. The magic was in the air around me, in the bubbles caught in the current of the wind.

The magic was there right up until a bubble danced to my lips and burst on my tongue. In the split-second between contact and taste I was shocked at having achieved my quest.

The shock was short-lived, however, as the filmy, acrid feel of the bubble filled my mouth. It didn’t taste like I thought magic ought to. I wiped my tongue on my shirt, spat into the grass, glared at the purple bottle in my fist, ran inside to repeatedly flush my mouth out with water.

I felt foolish for the first time, like a child. Only a child would run around for long hours in the burning sun, chasing impossible, disgusting bubbles. Only a child wouldn’t realize that the bubbles in the air were no different than the bubbles-to-be in the bottle. Only a child.